Seagate May Face a Pinch
From Cheaper Disk Drives

By

Bill Alpert Barron's

Updated April 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. ET

Inexpensive disk drives have become good enough to do some large computing jobs reliably. That's good news for users and for so-called storage-array vendors like Network Appliance and EMC. But it might not be good news for drive makers like Seagate Technology.

Big computers require large hard drives that run fast enough to keep up with the transaction-processing of a major business or other enterprise. So storage-array firms -- which bundle dozens of drives into a system that holds loads of data -- have favored specialized...